The Shepherd of High-Achieving Swimmers

INDIANAPOLIS — Ella Eastin felt as if she was having a breakthrough swim in the 400-meter individual medley final at the USA Swimming nationals last month. She knew for sure that she was when she took a breath during the final 100 meters of freestyle and caught a glimpse of her college coach, Greg Meehan.

Reserved by nature, Meehan, who leads the women’s program at Stanford, was pogoing on the deck and waving his arms overhead. The sight spurred Eastin to dig even deeper because, as she would later explain, “His approval means just as much to me as my parents’.”

Eastin’s joy over her time, a personal best by two seconds, was short-lived. She soon found out that she had been disqualified for spending too much time on her back on the freestyle flip turn. Meehan quickly materialized at her side to offer comfort. A day later, he choked up talking about her disqualification.

“You want it so much for them,” he said, referring to his swimmers.

Meehan’s 19 years in coaching have taken him from William & Mary to Stanford, with stops in between at Princeton, U.C.L.A., the University of the Pacific and the University of California, Berkeley. Along the way, he has built a reputation for taking high achievers whose standards of success are surpassed only by their fears of failing, and shepherding them with great enthusiasm to the mountaintops of their ambitions, be it qualifying for the N.C.A.A.s or making an international team.

Last fall, Meehan, 41, was entrusted with his most daunting challenge: guiding the 13-time world-record holder Katie Ledecky through the next stage of her aquatic development when she decided to attend Stanford. He had to manage his own self-doubts about mishandling an athlete who is perhaps USA Swimming’s most prized asset.

At the end of last year’s Rio de Janeiro Olympics, where Ledecky won four gold medals and a silver, the national team’s director, Frank Busch, took Meehan aside and playfully told him he better not mess up Ledecky’s swimming.

“I said to him, ‘I know you’re not actually joking,’” Meehan said, adding, “The enormity of the pressure is almost overwhelming, and that comes with the territory.”

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Ledecky awaiting her opponents after easily winning an 800-meter freestyle heat at the Rio Olympics, where she won four gold medals and a silver.CreditJames Hill for The New York Times

At Stanford, Ledecky, 20, broke out of the gate without a stumble in March, winning five national titles as a freshman to help the Cardinal women gain their first national championship since 1998. The 25-yard course used for collegiate competition is one marker of success, but the first real test of Ledecky’s training under Meehan, as he views it, will be the world championships in Budapest.

The swimming competition begins Sunday, and Meehan, who is the head coach of the American women’s team, was honest about the stakes.

“It’s obviously important for Stanford swimming, but it’s also important for USA Swimming that she does really well,” Meehan said of Ledecky, who is scheduled to compete in the 200-, 400-, 800- and 1,500-meter freestyle races and both freestyle relays.

The big picture matters to Meehan, who has a four-year day-by-day calendar spread across one wall of his Stanford office. The decorative touch made a favorable impression on the detail-oriented Ledecky during the recruiting process.

Meehan became the Cardinal’s head coach in 2012 after the resignation of Lea Maurer, a two-time individual national champion for Stanford who had been the women’s coach since 2004.

Meehan had been a nonscholarship swimmer at Rider University, where he specialized in the 200-yard backstroke while working toward undergraduate degrees in mathematics and secondary education. Before taking the Stanford job, he spent four seasons working with the men’s team at Stanford’s crosstown rival in Berkeley.

But that was not why his hiring caused some consternation on the Stanford campus. Every time an N.C.A.A. women’s sports program loses a female coach and hires a male replacement, it can be argued that progress takes a step backward.

According the Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport, only 17.2 percent of the coaches of N.C.A.A.-sponsored women’s swim programs were women in the 2016-17 school year.

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Meehan with Stanford swimmers in June. “You want it so much for them,” he said.CreditPreston Gannaway for The New York Times

No one could deny Meehan’s qualifications. In his four seasons as an assistant and associate coach at Berkeley, Cal won two N.C.A.A. championships, and before that, Meehan spent three seasons as the men’s and women’s head coach at University of the Pacific and four as the women’s assistant at U.C.L.A.

When he arrived at Stanford, Meehan hired Tracy Duchac as his assistant. She was pregnant with her first child at the time.

Among the reasons regularly trotted out for the dearth of women in coaching is the lack of a work-life balance that often forces women to choose between having a child or holding a job. Maya DiRado, a 2016 Olympian who was going into her junior season when Meehan came aboard, said the choice of Duchac sent a strong message to the team about inclusivity and female empowerment.

Duchac, now the mother of two small children, said: “When I look back, I see what Maya is saying. But in the moment it never crossed my mind. It just made sense in my head because it was like, wow, we connect on so many levels and I want to be a part of what he’s trying to build here.”

A swim practice early in Meehan’s first season opened DiRado’s eyes to what Meehan saw in her. She was in the middle of a freestyle set in which she was finishing comfortably ahead of her teammates on every swim. She was pretty pleased with herself. Then Meehan sidled over and suggested that she ought to be going a couple of seconds faster.

DiRado said her initial reaction was, Huh? But she did the rest of the swims a couple of seconds faster. “He was always at least a step or two ahead of me,” DiRado said in a telephone interview.

She did not plan on continuing to swim after exhausting her college eligibility, but Meehan talked her into it, and she was glad he did. At the Rio Games, DiRado won four medals, including two golds.

“I don’t think he’ll tell you he had this vision of me making the Olympic team,” DiRado, 24, said. “I think we did a good job of evolving together.”

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Maya DiRado after winning a gold medal at the Rio Olympics. “I don’t think he’ll tell you he had this vision of me making the Olympic team,” DiRado said of Meehan. “I think we did a good job of evolving together.”CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times

After rewarding his belief in her at the Olympics, DiRado repaid Meehan with a golf cart, which he uses to commute to and from the pool from the on-campus house where he lives with his wife, Tess, and two sons.

Swimmers coached by Meehan, past and present, tell similar stories of his devotion, which include holding the lap counter at the end of the lane in the distance races when no one else could be found to help out, or chipping in to set up the lane lines before practice, a task akin to a baseball manager chalking the field.

“Most coaches I know would say, ‘I’m too busy to do that,’” said April Woo, who swam under Meehand at Pacific and followed him into coaching, most recently as an assistant at Notre Dame.

The Pacific program that Meehan took over in 2005 was listing badly. He was the fourth coach in four years for the senior class that he inherited, which included Laura Blakey.

“A lot of us didn’t have much direction,” Blakey said in a telephone interview. “Greg was probably going, ‘What did I get myself into?’”

Blakey had entered college with designs on qualifying for the N.C.A.A. Division I championships in the distance freestyle events. By the time Meehan arrived, she had given up on that goal. “I was so out of it, swimming-wise,” she said.

With Meehan’s guidance, she resurrected her career. “He’s really positive, really confident,” she said. “It’s almost this undefinable thing that you can’t put your finger on.”

Blakey said she made substantial time drops to qualify for the 2006 N.C.A.A. championships in the 500- and 1,650-yard freestyles.

“Honestly, if it wasn’t for Greg, that wouldn’t have happened,” she said. “I wasn’t Katie Ledecky going to the Olympics, but he cared about me. He could tell I had a little bit left in me, and I wanted to prove him right.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page D2 of the New York edition with the headline: The Shepherd Of the Pool’s High Achievers. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe